His birthplace is the island of Hokkaidō . This region is one of those areas where the Ainu , an indigenous Japanese people, still live. As a young boy he listened to her music, and it influenced him so much that the creativity of this original music was also reflected in his own works, which he composed much later.
After listening to Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps at the age of 14 , he decided to devote himself to music. He taught himself to play the violin by himself and - initially - also to compose. His first work, the Bon Odori Suite for piano, made people sit up and take notice, although he only composed in his spare time. In 1935 he had his breakthrough with the orchestral work Japanese Rhapsody , with which he won first prize at the international competition for young composers initiated by Alexander Tscherepnin , who had just emigrated to Shanghai. The competition jury consisted of Albert Roussel , Arthur Honegger , Alexandre Tansman , Tibor Harsanyi , Pierre Octave Ferroud and Henri Gil-Marchex , who reached a unanimous verdict. The premiere was in 1936 by the Boston People's Orchestra under the direction of Febian Sevitsky . When Jean Sibelius attended the first performance in Helsinki in 1939 , the skepticism against Japanese composers, whose work was rarely performed abroad, and certainly not in Europe, was eliminated.
After completing his studies (forestry and music), he initially worked as a forester . During World War II, he served in the imperial army . There he also made studies of the elasticity and vibration behavior of wood .
After the Second World War he began teaching at Nihon University College of Art in 1946 . Here he stayed until 1953 and wrote works for the first time for the film (The End of the Silver Mountains) , especially for the Tōhō studios. His film music quickly became extremely popular, as it was characterized by great ingenuity and the symbiosis of Far Eastern and Western elements.
A milestone was certainly the music for Godzilla (Gojira) , a science fiction film by Ishirō Honda , which brought him an international reputation in the field of film music. That was the beginning of an “never-ending” story of composition for the film: more than 250 scores have been written since the mid-1950s. In Japan he is just as respected as a John Williams , Aaron Copland , Miklós Rózsa or Bernard Herrmann in the USA .
Even if the film music enabled him a financially worry-free life, his heart was still working as a freelance composer. In 1974 he returned to the Tokyo College of Music as a professor . A year later he even became president of the college. In 1987 he was still active as professor emeritus and president of the ethnomusicological department of the college. He published a 1000-page book on music theory and orchestration .
In 1957 he won the Mainichi Eiga Concours prize with the score for Mahiru no ankoku . In 1979 he was nominated for the film music Ogin-sama and in 1995 for the film music Gojira tai Mosura for the Japanese Film Prize of the Japanese Academy Awards .
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Ifukube is the family name, Akira the first name.
